Page 32 of Sin

“I have a good teacher,” I tell him as I shut the textbook and motion for our waiter to begin serving our meal. “Now I get my reward.”

"Reward? Your reward will be passing your class.”

“Nah, that’s boring.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Everything you have to give,” I tell him truthfully, and just as Cassidy is about to ask me what I mean, the waiter returns to the table with the first course.

Several hours later, I pull up to the circular driveway and put the car in park. Cassidy looks at me, strangely. “You’re not parking in the garage?”

“I’ll park it after I make sure you get in okay,” I tell him, glad I’d turned off the car’s interior lights so Cassidy won’t see the blush climbing up my neck and cheeks at my peculiar need to walk Cassidy to the door.

“Oh, okay,” Cassidy says, not quite sure of my new whim, but his easy-going nature goes along with it.

He gets out of the car, and I rush from my side to jump in front of him to close his door for him. At my gesture, he gives me a nervous smile.Great. You’re scaring him.I make an awkward hand motion for him to walk ahead of me to the front door.

Who the fuck am I right now?Mercer would be laughing his ass off if he were watching me try to play at being chivalrous. But screw him. This is all his fault. His talk of tonight being a date got in my head, and it’s making me act like an asshole—a different kind of asshole than I usually am.

In no time, we reach the doorstep. Cassidy shuffles his feet and looks up at me, obviously unsure of his part in the script for this little one-act play I sprang on him.

He’s not the only one.

I clear my throat. “Um, Thanks for the lesson. I think I’m really beginning to understand calculus because of you.”

“You really caught on to the subject fast,” he says. “And thank you for dinner. I really enjoyed tasting all those new dishes.”

“Not as much as I enjoyed sharing them with you. I like showing you new things. It’s like it makes me see the things I take for granted in a fresher way.”

And suddenly I realize why I’m being so unsure and inept.

Tonight is the first time I took a person I was attracted to out to dinner, and it wasn’t just a prelude to fucking. It’s the first time, with the exception of Mercer, I spent that much time with a person and really listened and enjoyed talking to them. It’s definitely the first time I walked a person to the door and felt a suspicious fluttering of nerves in my chest as I did it.

Tonight is my first date. Cassidy just gave me one ofmyfirsts.

And suddenly I’m recovered from my awkwardness because even though I’m new at this, I know what I’m supposed to do at the end of a date.

Slowly, I lean down and brush Cassidy’s lips with my own. Our second kiss is even sweeter than the first. Just as chaste, but this time I allow myself a few more seconds to memorize the feel and taste of his lips beneath mine. My body immediately comes alive and urges me to deepen the kiss, but I step away.

Cassidy lets out a sigh of disappointment, and it takes every ounce of previously never-utilized willpower to stop myself from pulling him into my arms.

I know I’ve stolen this night for myself, just like I stole his first kiss and this second one as well. Soon, Cassidy is going to finally walk away from me and this family for good, and I can’t let myself take any more from him.

“Goodnight, Cassidy,” I whisper in his ear and open the door for him so he can walk into the house and shut me out.

Chapter 16

Cassidy

I’m burning up. Every inch of me feels hot, restless and—wanting.

Sitting next to Sin all night, our bodies touching, breathing in the exotic scent of his skin, causing the sweet ache I always feel around him to build throughout the calculus lesson and then dinner. His light, too innocent kiss at the end of the night almost set me to flames.

I go to my room, not really feeling like being there. Not feeling like being anywhere—except with Sin.

The air is still and stifling, so I turn on the ceiling fan and open the window next to my bed. I think about taking a shower to help extinguish the heat that is licking through my veins, but I don’t want to douse it. I want to let it take me over.

Since I was fifteen, I’ve been fighting the way Sin makes my body come alive. Ashamed of my desire for my stepbrother, I battled it. Pushed it down, only for it to escape in my dreams and on long, torturous nights when I’d finally give in to my fantasies and pretend it was him touching me instead of my own hand.

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